Vijñāna (Sanskrit: विज्ञान) or viññāṇa (Pali: विञ्ञाण) is translated as "consciousness", "life force", "mind", or "discernment".
The term vijñāna is mentioned in many early Upanishads, where it has been translated by terms such as understanding, knowledge, and intelligence.
Yogachara (Sanskrit: योगाचार, IAST: Yogācāra) is an influential tradition of Buddhist philosophy and psychology emphasizing the study of cognition, perception, and consciousness through the interior lens of meditation, as well as philosophical reasoning (hetuvidyā). Yogachara was one of the two most influential traditions of Mahayana Buddhism in India, along with Madhyamaka.
The compound Yogācāra literally means "practice of yoga", or "one whose practice is yoga", hence the name of the school is literally "the school of the yogins". Yogācāra was also variously termed Vijñānavāda (the doctrine of consciousness), Vijñaptivāda (the doctrine of ideas or percepts) or Vijñaptimātratā-vāda (the doctrine of 'mere representation'), which is also the name given to its major theory of mind which seeks to deconstruct how we perceive the world. There are several interpretations of this main theory: various forms of Idealism, as well as a phenomenology or representationalism. Aside from this, Yogācāra also developed an elaborate analysis of consciousness (vijñana) and mental phenomena (dharmas), as well as an extensive system of Buddhist spiritual practice, i.e. yoga.